Born in 1965 to a Navajo mother and a Puerto Rican father, Mr. Soto fell in love with ballet at 5, when he saw Edward Villella on The Ed Sullivan Show. Rather remarkably, his mother took him to the nearest ballet school in Phoenix. At 12, he was accepted into the School of American Ballet in New York City, where he fended for himself on little money and lived and breathed ballet.
At 16 he was one of the last four dancers George Balanchine chose to join City Ballet. By 1984 he was a soloist, by 1985 a principal dancer. For the next 20 years choreographers would use him endlessly as inspiration, and his partnering prowess would become legendary.
Ms. Cates, a photographer, has made a film — her first — that looks at all of these main points of a major career, ending with his retirement. But as the title indicates — “Water Flowing Together” is Mr. Soto’s clan name — Ms. Cates seems intent on making Mr. Soto’s ambivalent relationship to his heritage the main subject of her film.
This would be fascinating if Ms. Cates made a convincing case of the importance of that relationship to his personality and career. But we get little real insight into either of the cloistered worlds — the reservation and dance — that Mr. Soto has inhabited. Instead there are archival photographs and clips. The all-important daily class is briefly shown; long rehearsals are mentioned; the toll on his body is cataloged. There is little that shows the realities of those lives in either sphere — the poverty on the reservations that Mr. Soto refers to, the drug of performance, the insecurities and pressure.
The extensive time devoted to Mr. Soto’s visits to his family in Arizona and in Puerto Rico tell us little, other than that these cultures are almost as alien to Mr. Soto as to most viewers. It is clear that Mr. Soto is a New Yorker, completely comfortable only in his ballet family and the city where he really grew up. “It will be nice to go back to New York,” he says wistfully during a visit to the reservation.
Although Mr. Soto is open about his homosexuality, there is little insight into his private life; his partner is shown only at the end, and his personal and artistic relationship with the choreographer Christopher Wheeldon is never mentioned. The closest we come to Mr. Soto is through his delightful, easygoing parents, who at one point do the merengue. (Mr. Soto’s mother died last month.) They are clearly proud of this son who has lived such an exotic life, and the evocation of these emotions is one of the best parts of the film.
So too is the poetic depiction of Mr. Soto’s retirement: the flowers, the applause, the brave smile, the final wave.
Scenes of him teaching at the School of American Ballet and proudly brandishing a Culinary Institute of America diploma do little to dim those images. Mr. Soto will be remembered for the pleasure his performances gave to so many; this film, almost incidentally, goes some way to preserve those memories.
Water Flowing Together is on most PBS stations on Tuesday night; in New York on Friday night at 10 on Channel 13
